High School is a 1968 American documentary film by Frederick Wiseman that shows a typical day for students and faculty at a Pennsylvanian high school during the late 1960s. It is one of the first direct cinema (or cinéma vérité) documentaries . It was shot over five weeks between March and April 1968 at Northeast High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The film was not shown in Philadelphia at the time of its release, because of Wiseman's concerns over what he called "vague talk" of a lawsuit.

The film was released in November 1968. High School has aired on PBS. Wiseman distributes his work (DVDs and 16mm prints) through Zipporah Films, which rents them to high schools, colleges, and libraries on a five-year long-term lease. High School was selected in 1991 for preservation in the National Film Registry.

In 1994, Wiseman released High School II, a second documentary on high school, based on Central Park East Secondary School in New York City.

Reception and interpretation

Film critic David Denby, writing in the New York Review of Books, described High School as "a savagely comic portrait" of an urban high school in a period of emerging social unrest:

In his review for The A.V. Club, A.A. Dowd wrote that High School “is filthy with the kind of revealing behavior that a documentarian can only hope and pray to capture on camera”, concluding:

For The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that the film was a "revelation" and that "Wiseman is probably the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in years."

See also

  • List of American films of 1968
  • List of films preserved in the United States National Film Registry

References

  • Ellsworth, Liz. Frederick Wiseman: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston, MA: G.K.Hall & Co., 1979.
  • Grant, Barry Keith. "Five films by Frederick Wiseman" University of California Press, 2006.
  • Rosenthal, Alan. The New Documentary In Action: A Casebook in Film Making. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971.
  • High School essay by Barry Grant on the National Film Registry website. [https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/high_school.pdf]
  • High School essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 , pages 637-639 [https://books.google.com/books?id=deq3xI8OmCkC&source=gbs_similarbooks]
  • Comma, Space: Frederick Wiseman's "High School" (1968) essay by Craig Keller
  • High School on Kanopy.